Jenkins, Heliotis, Stein, and Haynes, 1987

Paragraph Restatements

(Jenkins, Heliotis, Stein, and Haynes, 1987)

Essential Learning

2.1.2 Demonstrate comprehension of the main idea and supporting details; summarize ideas in own words.

Background and Research Question

Joseph R. Jenkins, James D. Heliotis, Marcy Stein, and Mariana Haynes conducted a study with 32 elementary students with learning disabilities in which one group of students was trained to use a comprehension monitoring strategy and one group worked on regularly assigned seatwork materials.

The research team was interested in answering two questions: (1) Do students who are trained to use paragraph restatements in assessment situations use the strategy when not explicitly prompted to do so? (2) Does paragraph restatement training affect students’ reading comprehension under conditions that did not permit overt application of the strategy?

Students who were trained in the paragraph restatement strategy exhibited better comprehension than did the control students on both a reading comprehension test administered immediately after training as well as on two subsequent reading comprehension tests.

Translating Research Into Practice

Paragraph restatement training consists of three phases. Phases one and two require materials in which narrative reading selections are typed with lined spaces between each paragraph. Phase three requires students to have narrative text without lined space between each paragraph. Students proceed to subsequent phases when the group reaches 80 percent correct. Training is completed in ten to 15 days with lessons lasting about 20 minutes.

Phase 1. For this phase, prepare narrative reading selections with a lined space between each paragraph. As a full-group activity, tell students to use the lined space to name the most important person in each paragraph and state the major event that occurred.

Guide students to formulate their restatements by remembering two questions: (1) Who? and (2) What’s happening? If students do not generate a restatement, have them reread the paragraph. If students identify a relatively unimportant event from a paragraph, ask “Was that the most important thing that happened in the paragraph?”

Phase 2. Help students to condense restatements to include the fewest possible words (usually three or four) which convey the gist of the major event. Have students practice writing brief restatements after each paragraph of reading assignments. Check students’ work and give corrective feedback as necessary. When students finish, read the restatements back to the student, and ask the student to elaborate on the paragraph content.

Phase 3. Assign passages and show students how to record restatements on a separate sheet of paper.

Source

Jenkins, J.R., Heliotis, J.D., Stein, M.L., and Haynes, M.C. (1987). Improving reading comprehension by paragraph restatements. Exceptional Children,54(1), 54–59.